


It's Been a Long Day (Without You, My Friend)

by Drag0nst0rm



Category: Fablehaven Series - Brandon Mull
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Background Character Death, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Seth is an Eternal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-20
Updated: 2020-07-20
Packaged: 2021-03-04 23:20:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,839
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25404502
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Drag0nst0rm/pseuds/Drag0nst0rm
Summary: Somehow, the adventures just aren't quite as fun anymore.
Relationships: Kendra Sorenson & Seth Sorenson, Seth Sorenson & Original Animal Character(s)
Comments: 6
Kudos: 48





	It's Been a Long Day (Without You, My Friend)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MegMarch1880](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MegMarch1880/gifts).



> Title from "See You Again."

It’s not that Seth regrets becoming an Eternal, exactly. He’s been really careful not to let himself regret it, actually, because he’s heard way too many stories about exactly how that ended last time. 

And the world’s full of so much cool stuff! There’s so much to see, to do, to try - how could he ever get sick of this? He’s a professional monster hunter now, dealing with everything that escapes from fallen preserves, and how cool is that? Life is good. Life is _awesome._

Seth is neck deep in a stack of bestiaries in an attempt to figure out just what he’s hunting when he finally concedes that maybe life isn’t . . . quite as awesome as it used to be.

Even if he isn’t quite ready to think about why.

This comes to his attention in the form of Tara slithering over his stack of books and looking at the pictures most of them are open to. Seth picks her up because the last thing he needs is three feet of snake covering up his notes, but she just curls around his neck and keeps looking. 

“Ooh, a bonaccon! Is this what we’re going after?”

“Looks like it,” he says absently, and he bends over the books in an attempt to get a better look at the pages in the archive’s dim light. It looks like an oddly colored cow, mostly, except for the fiery air depicted coming out of its rear end. Or possibly poisonous air, which is a very important distinction to make, but apparently previous archivists hadn’t agreed with him.

It takes him a long moment to realize Tara’s silence is expectant. Actually, it takes her tail poking him in the ear with her tail and saying, “Well?” in an encouraging tone for him to realize that.

“I think I want some potions for this one,” he says. It’s not strictly necessary for him, that’s part of the whole point of him being the one to do this job, but if it’s poisonous, he doesn’t want to accidentally track that back into town with him, and if it’s fiery . . . well, it wouldn’t be the first time his clothes got completely destroyed on a job, but he could definitely do without it happening again.

Tara sighs. “And . . . ?”

“And . . . you want some too?”

Her head butts against his. Gently, sure, but with a bit of exasperation behind it. “I’ve been waiting all night. Go ahead. Put me out of my misery.”

Seth blinks at her.

She’s entirely exasperated now. “Aren’t you going to make at least one fart joke?”

Oh. Right. 

If Kendra was here, she’d - 

He flinches back from the thought and closes the nearest book with a bit more force than is strictly necessary. “Poison’s not funny,” he mutters.

Tara flinches with her whole body and curls tighter around Seth’s shoulders. “Right,” she says. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have - “

“Don’t worry about it,” he says, throwing a couple of books into his satchel. The archivist, a wizened old man he’d bartered with for hours, had said Seth could take whatever could fit in the bag. It wasn’t Seth’s fault the man hadn’t checked to make sure the inside of the bag wasn’t bigger than it looked, and he’s pretty sure the old man stole half of these in the first place, so ethically speaking - 

Well, ethically speaking, it’s still wrong, but he isn’t going to lose sleep over it. He’s done worse than this.

He’d meant to take more advantage of it than this, but -

But the books are just for him now, and he’s mostly interested in the ones on obscure Shadow Charmer rituals, because even objectively hilarious monster facts just aren’t worth hauling around anymore without someone who’d be grossed out by them.

It’s been years now. It’s fine. He’s fine.

Tara squeezes him gently one more time. Her tail flicks against something wet on his cheek.

It’s fine.

He has a zombie hand now, for perfectly legitimate reasons.

Namely, those reasons are that Lara DeGraves, a fabulously wealthy collector, desperately wants one, and he desperately wants a chance to get inside her mansion so he can find out if the rumors of her having the journals of an ancient Shadow Charmer are true. 

The hand thrashes in his in a bizarre parody of human touch, and he knows he can’t die, but he can’t help but wonder, just for a moment, if becoming one of the undead is off the table. He’s talked to a lot of the undead over the years. Most of them are - well, pretty miserable, actually, but some of them are too mindless to be miserable, and being brainless seems kind of appealing.

Not that being brainless would be anything new, as Kendra constantly reminds -

He stuffs the zombie hand in the curse box he prepared and snaps it shut decisively. The rest of the zombie is lying in several pieces around him, still twitching on the dry, cracked earth of high summer, just waiting for him to release it with fire.

He’ll do that, just as soon as Tara stops poking the remaining hand.

“Don’t bite that,” he says in exasperation, wondering in no little horror when he became the responsible one. “You don’t know where it’s been.”

Tara ignores him. “You could keep this one for yourself,” she suggests. “I know you always wanted one. Just think of how many pranks you could pull with it!”

Seth snorts. “Pranks on who?”

Tara draws herself up from her coils indignantly. “What am I, chopped liver?”

Seth swallows. No. Of course not. “Yeah, but you suggested the prank,” he says with forced cheer. “You’ll be expecting it. And you’re too used to all this creepy stuff anyway, you wouldn’t be freaked out.”

Tara droops a little. “True.”

Seth summons a ball of fire in his hand and barely notices the extra heat. “Besides,” he says softly, looking at the now unrecognizable face on the remains. “They deserve more respect than that.”

Tara looks pointedly at the curse box. 

Seth ignores her. She’s slithered away, and that’s the point. 

As long as Tara’s safe, that’s all that matters now. 

Things can always get worse. Seth knows this and lives by it. 

He gets his periodic reminder of this after he attempts to break into someone’s vault to steal a particular necromantic artifact and he’s summarily thrown into their attempt at a deep dark dungeon.

The dungeon is moderately dark, probably, but it’s not like he can’t still see fine, and, frankly, after all this time, he’s something of a connoisseur of dungeons, and he’s not that impressed. 

He’s . . . kind of bleeding out from a gut wound, actually, which hurts, like, a lot, but it’s not like he’s going to die from it, and Tara’s still out there somewhere wreaking havoc, so he’ll get out of this, probably, and things have definitely not hit rock bottom.

He gets one step closer to rock bottom when he’s thrown into his cell and realizes he’s not in there alone.

“We have got to stop meeting like this,” Bracken says with dark humor from where he’s chained to the wall.

Seth raises his head from where he’s more or less collapsed into a fetal position and suggests, “Or we could just stop meeting at all.”

Bracken’s face twists painfully, and for a second Seth considers that maybe, just maybe, he’s being a little unfair.

He stops considering this a moment later when his body decides that while it might not die from this, it can and will pass out.

Obviously, this is the universe’s way of telling him that there is absolutely no need to reconsider his position on the Bracken Issue, and far be it from Seth to disagree.

He visits the Sphinx eventually because, honestly, at this point, why not.

The Sphinx’s lair is more of a glorified prison than anything, but that doesn’t matter for what Seth is here for. 

There’s a foosball table in the room where the Sphinx deals with the rare visitors he’s permitted, and Seth has to stare at it for a long moment because he’s pretty sure that it’s the same foosball table they played on when Seth first met the man, which means that foosball table has outlived not just most of their mutual acquaintances but also several countries. 

Maybe its survival should be a hopeful thing, but it just makes him angry instead. 

“How do you do it?” he asks abruptly. “How do you handle outliving everyone?”

It’s a mistake. He knows it as soon as he asks it.

“Who’s dead?” the Sphinx asks with compassion Seth can almost believe is sincere, and he - can’t. Tara is stiff and wary on his shoulders, and he won’t risk vulnerability. Not here. Not with him.

Not with much of anyone these days. 

He spins on his heels and walks out.

It shouldn’t make him feel even an iota better to see the Sphinx still alive when so many better people are dead.

It does, a little.

Not nearly enough.

He’d briefly thought about asking about the other thing, but that’s far, far too big a risk.

(He’s not there when it happens. He’s a continent away doing something awesome and pointless and utterly stupid. 

It’s not like he would have been with her if he hadn’t been there. They kept contact to a minimum for security reasons, but they talked almost every night with the enchanted pocket mirrors he’d found somewhere in England, he doesn’t even remember exactly where now - 

Anyway. It doesn’t matter now. She doesn’t answer that night. She doesn’t answer for days, and Tara’s panicked arguments that he could be walking straight into a trap stop him for approximately point five seconds before he’s on the fastest plane he can find.

He doesn’t find her when he gets there. Just a bunch of horrifically sorry Astrid guards, and a Bracken who has the grim look of someone who is understanding his mother’s grief-stricken policies for the very first time. 

Seth doesn’t care how bad Bracken feels. He cares that Bracken was here, and this still happened.

Poison, they tell him, and it’s done and dusted already, revenge taken, threat gone, but he won’t believe it, not yet, not when he’s done all this before with that stupid stingbulb.

He won’t believe it. 

He keeps that mantra going for _years._ )

The fun thing about denial is that in their world, sometimes it works.

At least, it works if you’re a Shadow Charmer with access to long forgotten rituals, way too much time on your hands, and access to the relevant body.

“You realize this is insane, right?” Tara checks as he draws the last lines of the circle over Kendra’s grave.

It is. It is actually, objectively, undebateably crazy.

Seth can’t stop grinning. He hasn’t felt this good in years.

“I know,” he says. “Isn’t it great?”

He smacks his palm into the center of the circle and wills.

And deep below, something _shifts._


End file.
